Bloody Knuckles, the War Has Already Started!

Russia was at war with Japan, and Japan was soundly defeating the Russians. Even though the Russians were badly losing, their tsar Nicholas II refused to end the war. Many soldiers were needlessly dying. On top of that, the working class of Russians were being treated very poorly.

Lenin blames the rich capitalists for every ill of society. Without regard to anything else, he piles hate on top of them, blaming them for “rivers of blood”, exploitation, and making “the government and army their servants….” Blood is strongly alluded to in this piece. Being engaged in a war, the people of Russia would have very tangible ideas associated with blood. Lenin refers to the capitalistic, rich owners of capital as “blood-suckers.” Imagine having an enemy shed the blood of your son or brother, how would you feel about being oppressed under a “blood-sucker”?

Interestingly, he never really uses plural pronouns like “we” or “us”. When he is trying to get the people up in arms he states that the revolution has already begun. “The workers of all lands are fighting to free labour from wage slavery” he cried to the people. The story he tells is a compelling one. He describes so many of the ills that the laborers have had to deal with, whether it is working their hands to the bone, or begging for permission to work, they all have had issues with these capitalists.

Imagine the imagery of a bloody river for those
 who had just lost loved ones in the war

In communicating to these laborers he gives the sense that he is truly present. At the end of his speech he calls for the workers to go to action! Every sentence begins with “Let” and ends with an exclamation point. Such parallelism leads to a convincing climax! Then he closes with another parallelism, followed by antithesis: “Long live the eight-hour day! Long live the international revolutionary Social-Democracy! Down with the criminal and plundering tsarist autocracy!” Long live us, down with the tsar. The whole speech builds up to that moment.

In order to get to that moment, the topics of invention that Lenin employs are definition, for he defines the working class as beggars and the working class as blood-suckers. He references cause and effect a lot. The upper classes have been putting down the lower classes and thus the natural conclusion to that is that the lower classes revolt and throw off the upper classes. Comparison is also used extensively to highlight the differences between the classes. In all, he effectively gets the people enraged enough to overthrow the government (albeit a few years later).